Former snowboarder Jake Suchowski breaks 30-year-old diving record at Rocky Mountain High
As a competitive snowboarder, Jake Suchowski’s primary focus was to avoid landing jumps on his head.
As a high school diver, he’s had to flip that mentality upside down.
Literally.
The perfect “stomp” landing of a well-executed aerial flip or series of flips on a snowboard that Suchowski spent years perfecting while competing for the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club has been replaced by the minimal-splash water entry judges are looking for in the diving events that he now competes in for Rocky Mountain High School and the Norco Diving Club.
“The body control translates great; I just knew where I was overall,” Suchowski said before a recent practice with his club team. “But being able to translate from knowing I need to land on my feet to ‘I need to do all this stuff to make it look good and then go in on my head,’ that was really difficult.”
Now that he has gotten over that mental hurdle, nothing is holding him back.
'It's been fun watching him develop'
Suchowski, a senior, broke a 30-year-old school record in his first meet this season and improved upon it in his next two while establishing himself as one of the top high school divers in Colorado.
The 344.45 points he earned on six dives in a four-team meet with Fort Collins, Horizon and Monarch on March 29 at Edora Pool Ice Center is more than 50 points better than the previous school record of 272.6 set in 1992 by Matt Nesbitt, the father of one of Suchowski’s closest friends.
His next target is the 11-dive school record of 505.85 set in 2011 by Eric McMillin, a mark he could break in the annual City Meet at 5 p.m. Monday at EPIC, where he’ll be pushed by club teammate and Fort Collins High standout Brendan Stanley, Norco Diving Club coach Luke Richmond said.
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Suchowski has a unique combination of strength, body control, spatial awareness and the grit and determination to make the most of each of those traits, Richmond said.
“He’s just been a great listener,” Richmond said before a recent club practice at EPIC. “Combined with his work ethic and then his natural ability honed, it’s what a lot of coaches hope to have. It’s been fun watching him develop.”
Richmond, a standout diver himself at Rocky Mountain, eyed Nesbitt’s record but couldn’t break it before graduating in 1997. He wishes he could have started working with Suchowski sooner.
Suchowski, though, had his sights set on snowboarding in the X Games or Winter Olympics.
From the slopes to the swimming pool
He had become enamored with snowboarding as a toddler, said his mother, Heather.
“I remember when he was 2 years old, maybe 3, and he had managed to get the wheels off of his skateboard and strapped little tennis shoes onto the board with duct tape,” she said. “Ever since that time, he was either on wheels or on a board. He was a really athletic kid. He’d build these jumps in the backyard and wanted to get them just right so he could do a flip off it.”
The converted skateboard was soon replaced by a plastic snowboard and then a real one Jake could ride at ski areas near their home in Troy, Michigan. Jake clearly had some natural ability and talent as a snowboarder, Heather said, so it was a “no-brainer” to find an instructional program for him to get involved in when the family moved to Fort Collins.
He attended a camp that first winter at Copper Mountain and earned a “camper of the week” award, she said. Jake joined the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club as a sixth-grader, participating only on weekends when his parents, Heather and Mike, could make the drive to Steamboat Springs or competitions at other ski areas in the region.
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Coaches there, including some whom Jake had seen compete in the X Games on TV, saw his potential but said he needed to be with them full-time to receive the training and coaching necessary for him to reach his full potential, Heather said. Weekend warriors don’t make it to the X Games or Olympics, as Jake had dreamed of while doing flips off those makeshift jumps in his backyard in Michigan.
“In that world, if you’re not getting to the Dew Tour by 14 or 15, you’re not going to the Olympics,” Heather said.
So the family came up with a unique plan that would allow Jake to spend an entire winter practicing and competing with the team.
Jake, who was attending Liberty Common School, took as many summer-school courses through Poudre School District as he could, allowing him to take the second and third quarters of his eighth-grade year off.
The family rented an apartment in Steamboat Springs in a ski-in, ski-out complex on Mount Werner and invited friends and family to come stay with Jake for a week or two at a time.
“We put together a Google calendar and shared it,” Heather said. “We said, ‘We’ve got Jake trying to live the dream. All expenses paid if you come stay with him. We’ll fill the ‘fridge; you just have to get him to practice and make sure he’s fed.’ ”
They had 15 to 20 takers, all either relatives or family friends that Jake already knew well. Heather and/or Mike would come up most weekends to check in on Jake, spend their own quality time with him, restock the refrigerator and provide whatever instructions were necessary to whoever was taking care of Jake for the coming week.
“There were definitely some repeats in there and grandparents who stayed a month at a time,” she said. “It was pretty special. They got to live in that life with him for a bit, and he was progressing well.”
So well that they decided he should take it to another level. They signed up Jake to train with Bud Keene, who coached Shaun White in his first two Olympic Games, the following winter and arranged for Jake to follow the snow to New Zealand the next summer to give him the kind of year-round training necessary to reach the top levels of his sport.
But Jake had broken his left collarbone on the same day, March 4, each of the previous two years, competing with it pinned together at the national championships that first year. He was beginning to wonder about his future in the sport, concerned about how he would complete high school while traveling so much and uncomfortable with the amount of money his family was spending to allow him to pursue his dream.
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“The September before he was supposed to go, he had this huge heart-to-heart moment and said, ‘I don’t know if I want this to be my career,’ ” Heather said. “ ‘The best snowboarders in the world, their bodies are broken down and they still have to go coach for a living. I don’t want to have to work at a ski mountain. I want to be able to go to college and have a career.’ ”
He decided to attend Rocky Mountain High School and give diving a try. Rocky Mountain’s coach at the time was Rob Huey, who had been Jake’s sixth-grade history teacher at Liberty Common.
'He's going to break my record'
Jake wasn’t too keen on wearing the tiny Speedo trunks that divers wear in practice and meets, his mother said. But he discovered that some of his closest friends, including Nesbitt’s son Walker, were on the team. So he stuck with it and had immediate success, qualifying for the Class 5A state championships as a freshman and finishing 25th.
“I remember that first meet, I was sitting next to another dad, and he said, ‘Your son’s going to break my record,’ ” Heather said. “It was Matt, and he said, ‘If he gets that air awareness, he’s going to break my record, because the coaches can teach him all that other stuff.’ ”
Jake’s sophomore year of diving, both the club and high school seasons were lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. He finished ninth at last year’s state championships. And, spurred by that success, he made the same kind of commitment to diving that he had once made to snowboarding.
“In the beginning, I didn’t like diving at all, because I was a snowboarder,” Jake said. “I had the mentality of just being creative and not conforming to this dive list and having to do it perfectly. But over time, I started to see some success in it. And then I started to see how I could kind of be creative in my own way about it and how to make dives look good in my own way.
“As I learned more and got better and better, it was like, ‘This is really cool, I really like this,’ and then it turned into a total passion for the sport.”
Snowboarding also taught him to push his limits in a way that divers with a background in gymnastics and other sports with a heavy emphasis on perfection often can’t, Richmond said. Jake rarely hesitates to try a new trick, regardless of how many bruises he receives from “smacks” — hitting the water awkwardly — while learning how to complete a particular dive.
His rapid progression in a sport that’s still relatively new to him, coupled with a tremendous willingness to put in the work necessary to become the best he can possibly be, Richmond said, earned him a spot on the University of Utah’s diving team next fall. Scholarship amounts and details are still being discussed, Jake said, but the school — located just 30 minutes away from some of Utah’s best ski and snowboarding slopes — and its men’s swimming and diving program are a perfect fit.
Jake signed with the Utes in February.
Then he went out and broke that seemingly unbeatable 30-year-old school record: by more than seven points in a March 22 dual with Poudre, by more than 38 in a March 25 dual at Loveland and by nearly 62 in that March 29 meet at EPIC.
He’s still a relative newcomer to diving. He doesn’t really know how far he can go in the sport.
But he’s eager to find out.
“When I was young, that was always my dream, to be at the top level of whatever I was doing,” Jake said. “I wanted to be the best.
“I wasn’t knowledgeable about diving when I first started, so I just didn’t know how far I could go. That mind block of going in upside down; it held me back. But now that my improvement has been pretty quick for the past nine months, it’s always in the back of my head; it’s always there.
“It’s what pushes me to get better. I want to be the best I can possibly be.”
Kelly Lyell reports on CSU, high school and other local sports and topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, follow him on Twitter @KellyLyell and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. If you 're a subscriber, thank you for your support. If not, please consider purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Snowboarding helps Rocky Mountain's Jake Suchowski break diving record
